4/11/2001
EAST LANSING, Mich. - In 1965, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. challenged Michigan State University students to help in the fight against segregation and spoke out in favor of STEP, a unique MSU student education project in Mississippi.
On Wednesday, April 18, Coretta Scott King, wife of the late civil rights leader, will visit MSU to keep alive Dr. King's legacy and dream of nonviolence and racial and economic justice.
King will speak from 3 to 5 p.m. in the MSU Auditorium, the same venue where her husband spoke on his previous visits to campus. The doors will open to the public at 2:30 p.m.
Parking is very limited near the MSU Auditorium. Individuals attending the program are urged to use public transportation or park off campus. Limited parking will be available in Lot 66-A on the corner of Harrison Road and Kalamazoo Street. The entrance to the lot is just west of Harrison Road off Kalamazoo Street. Two MSU buses have been reserved to shuttle persons from this lot to the front door of the auditorium from 2 to 3 p.m.
King has traveled throughout the world speaking on behalf of women's and children's rights, gay and lesbian dignity, religious freedom, the needs of the poor and homeless, educational opportunities, nuclear disarmament and health, employment and ecological concerns. She is also active in developing programs and building the Atlanta-based Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change as a living memorial to her husband's life and dream.
In some respects, her visit is like a homecoming, said Robert L. Green, a professor in the David Walker Research Institute and a friend of the King family since 1963.
"Mrs. King started visiting MSU after the assassination of her husband, and has brought her children here for week-long visits, and her son visited local public schools," Green said. "She has held formal speaking engagements here and she's very aware Dr. King made some major addresses here. She's coming here to keep Dr. King's legacy alive."
The STEP program King spoke of on his MSU visit in February 1965 was to raise funds in support of Rust College, an African-American institution in Holly Springs, Miss. Local students and faculty planned a summer reading improvement clinic for high school juniors and seniors and seminars for faculty and students, among other projects.
Mrs. King's visit to MSU is being sponsored by several institutions, including the MSU Office of the President, the Office of the Provost, MSU Office of Minority Student Affairs, the David Walker Research Institute, the Lansing Public Schools, Lansing Community College and Olivet College.
A biography of Mrs. King follows:
CORETTA SCOTT KING
Coretta Scott King entered the world stage in 1955 as wife of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and as a leading participant in the American Civil Rights Movement. She has traveled throughout the world carrying the messages of nonviolence and the dream of the beloved community to almost every corner of the globe. She has led goodwill missions to many countries in Africa and Latin America, Europe and Asia.
During Dr. King's career, she spoke before church, civic, college, fraternal and peace groups and performed a series of Freedom Concerts, which combined prose and poetry narration with musical selections and functioned as fundraisers for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
From 1968 to 1995 she devoted her life to developing The King Center, the first institution built in memory of an African-American leader. As founding president, chairperson and chief executive officer, she dedicated herself to providing local, national and international programs that have trained thousands of individuals in Dr. King's philosophy and methods. She guided the creation and housing of the largest archives of documents from the Civil Rights Movement and spearheaded the educational and lobbying campaign to establish Dr. King's birthday as a national holiday.
She served as a Women's Strike for Peace delegate to the 17-nation Disarmament Conference in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1962. She is the first woman to deliver the class day address at Harvard, and the first woman to preach at a statutory service at St. Paul's Cathedral in London.
In preparation for the Reagan-Gorbachev talks, in 1988 she served as head of the U.S. delegation of Women for a Meaningful Summit in Athens, Greece, and in 1990, as the USSR was redefining itself, she was co-convenor of the Soviet-American Women's Summit in Washington, D.C.
Mrs. King was born and raised in Marion, Ala., and graduated valedictorian from Lincoln High School. She received a bachelor's degree in music and education from Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, then studied concert singing at Boston's New England Conservatory of Music, where she earned a degree in voice and violin. She met her husband while he was studying for his doctorate in systematic theology at Boston University. They were married in 1953 and moved to Montgomery, Ala., in 1954. She is the mother of four children.